Extend /boot from within a Linux system

This is a tricky one. In order to resize /boot, which is, commonly the first partition, you need to push forward the beginning of the next partition. This is not an easy task, especially if you are not using LVM – then you have to use external partitioning modification tools, like PQMagic (if it still exists, who knows?), or other such offline tools.

However, if you are using LVM, there is a (complex) trick to it. We need to evict some of the first few PEs, resize the partition to begin at a new location, and then re-sign (and restore) the LVM meta-data in a way which will reflect the relative change in data blocks position (aka – the new PEs). To have some additional grasp of LVM and its meta-data, I recommend you read my article here.

Also, and this is an important note – you cannot change an open (in-use) partition on systems prior to RHEL 8 (on which I have not tested my solution just yet) – meaning – you can change the partition layout on the disk, but the kernel will not refresh that information and would not act accordingly until reboot.

If you have not tried this before, or not sure about all the details in this post, I urge you to use a VM for testing purposes. A failure in this process might leave your data inaccessible, and you do not want that.

So, we have a complex set of tasks:

• If there is some empty space somewhere on the LVM PV, migrate the first X blocks out.
• Export the LVM meta-data so we could edit it afterwards
• Recreate the partition (delete and recreate) with a new starting location
• (here comes the tricky part) – sign the partition’s updated beginning with LVM meta-data, with the updated relative block locations.

Assumptions:

• The disk partition layout is /boot as /dev/sda1 and LVM PV on /dev/sda2
• The LVM VG name is ‘VG’
• We are using modern dracut-capable system, such as RHEL/CentOS version 6 and above (not tested on version 8 yet)
• We use basic (msdos) partition layout and not GPT

Clear 500MB for further use, if not enough free space in PV:

In order to do so, we will need 500MB of free space in our PV. If space is an issue, you can easily clean up space from the swap space, by stopping swap, reducing the LV size, signing swap with ‘mkswap’ and starting swap again. This is in a nutshell, and I will not go further into it.

Move the first 500MB out of the beginning of the PV:

We need to do some math. The size of a single PE is defined in the LVM VG settings. By default it is 4MB today, and it can be checked using ‘vgdisplay’ command. Look for the field ‘PE Size’. So – 500MB is 125 PEs. So our command would be:

pvmove --alloc anywhere /dev/sda2:0-124

Which will migrate the first 125 PEs starting at position 0 to 124 away somewhere in the VG.

Export LVM meta-data to a file, and edit it for future handling:

vgcfgbackup -f /tmp/vg-orig.txt VG 

This command will create a file called /tmp/vg-orig.txt which will contain the original VG meta-data copy. We will clone this file and edit it:

cp /tmp/vg-orig.txt /tmp/vg.txt

Now comes the more complex part. We need to adjust the meta-data file to reflect the relative change in the block location. We will edit the new /tmp/vg.txt file. Initially – find the block describing ‘pv0’, which is the first PV in your VG (and maybe the only one), and verify that ‘pv0’ is the correct device, by verifying the ‘device’ directive in this block.
Now comes the harder part – Each LV block in the meta-data file has a sub-section describing disk segments. These blocks describe the relative location of the LV in the PVs. I have already pointed at my article describing the meta-data file and how to read it. The task is to find the ‘stripes’ directive in each LV sub-segment, and reduce the amount of PEs – in our case – 125. It needs to be done for all LVs which reside on our ‘pv0’ – one after the other. An example would look like this:

lvswap { ### Another LV
			id = "E3Ei62-j0h6-cGu5-w9OB-l9tU-0Qf5-f09bvh"
			status = ["READ", "WRITE", "VISIBLE"]
			flags = []
			creation_host = "localhost.localdomain"
			creation_time = 1594157749	# 2019-01-01 08:42:29 +0000
			segment_count = 1

			segment1 {
				start_extent = 0  ### Tee LE of the LV. On LEs - later ###
				extent_count = 94	# 2.9375 Gigabytes

				type = "striped"
				stripe_count = 1	# linear

				stripes = [
					# Was: "pv0", 1813. Now:
					"pv0", 1688 ### reduced 125 PEs ###
				]
			}
		}

Copy the resulting file /tmp/vg.txt (after double-checking it!) to /boot. We will use /boot later on to re-sign the PV meta-data.

Recreate the partition:

Another tricky part. You cannot just resize a partition, or at least – without the tool (parted, fdisk – depending on your OS version) attempting to resize the over-layer, and failing to do so. Most tools do not allow changes to the size of the partitions at all, so we will need to delete and recreate the partition layout. Now, depending if you are using GPT or msdos partition, your tools might vary, but in this case, I handle only msdos partition layout, so the tools will be in accordance. Other tools can apply for GPT layout, and the process, in general, will work on GPT as well.

So – we will backup the partition layout before we change it. The command ‘sfdisk’ will allow us to do so, so we can call

sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /boot/original-disk-layout.txt

I am leaving quite a lot of stuff on /boot partition, because this partition is not a member of the LVM volume group, and will remain, mostly, unaffected during our process. You can use an external USB disk, or any other non-LVM partition, as long as you verify you can access it from within the boot process, directly from initrd/initramfs, or dracut. /boot is, commonly, accessible from within the boot process.

Now we modify the partition layout. To do so, I recommend to document the original start point of the two interesting partitions – /boot (usually /dev/sda1) and our PV (in this example: /dev/sda2). I prefer using ‘sector’ directives. An example would be:

parted -s /dev/sda "unit s p"

It is common, for modern Linux systems, to have /boot starting at sector 2048 (which is 1MB into the disk). This is due to block alignment, however, I will not discuss this here. The interesting part is the size of a sector (commonly 512b, but can be 4K for ‘advanced format’ disks), so we will be able to calculate the new partitions starting positions and sizes.

Now, using ‘parted’ we need to remove the 2nd partition (in my example, note. It might vary on your setup) and recreate it at a newer location – 125PEs further, or 500MB further, or 1024000 sectors ahead. So, if our starting sector is 411648(s), then we will have to create the partition starting at sector 1435648 (=411648+1024000), with the original ending location. Don’t forget to set this partition to LVM. Assuming you have saved the starting point of the partition in the variable StartOfPart, and the original ending in EndOfPart, your command would look like this:

parted -s /dev/sda "unit s rm 2 mkpart primary $(( StartOfPart + 1024000 )) ${EndOfPart} set 2 lvm on"

Now, we need to recreate the /boot partition (partition #1 in my example) to include the new size. Again – we need to document its beginning, and now recreate it. Assuming we have kept the same variables as before, the command would look like this:

parted -s /dev/sda "unit s rm 1 mkpart primary ${StartOfPart} $(( EndOfPart + 1024000 - 1 )) set 1 boot on"

The kernel will not update the new partitions sizes because they are in use. We will need a reboot, however – when we reboot (do not do that just yet), we will no longer have access to our LVM. This is because it will not have meta-data anymore, and we will need to recreate it.

Prepare a script to place in /boot, called vgrecover.sh which will hold the following lines:

#!/bin/sh
sed -i 's/locking_type = 4/locking_type = 0/g' /etc/lvm/lvm.conf
lvm pvcreate -u ${PVID} --restorefile /mnt/vg.txt /dev/sda2
lvm vgcfgrestore -f /mnt/vg.txt VG

You need to save the PVID for /dev/sda2 and replace this value in this script. This is the field ‘PV UUID’ in the output of the command:

pvdisplay /dev/sda2

Some more explanations: The device in our example is /dev/sda2 (change it to match your device name), and the VG name is ‘VG’ (again – change to match your setup). This script needs to be placed on /boot and be made executable.

Before our reboot:

We need to verify the following files exist on our /boot:

• vg.txt
• vgrecover.sh
• original-disk-layout.txt

If any of these files is missing, you will not be able to boot, you will not be able to recover your system, and you will not be able to access the data there ever again!

I also recommend you keep your original-disk-layout.txt file somewhere external. If you have made a partitioning mistake and changed the beginning of /boot, you will not have access to /boot and all its files, and having this file elsewhere (on external disk, for example) will help you recover the partition layout quickly and with no frustration.

Now comes another risky part: reboot and get into recovery shell used by GRUB. See my article here to understand how to enter recovery shell. If you have a different OS version, your boot arguments might differ. An external boot media (like RHEL/CentOS recovery boot, or Ubuntu live) could also suffice to complete the task, but it is preferred to use the GRUB recovery console to reduce the change of some unknown automatic task or detection process doing stuff for you.

We need to break the boot sequence in the pre-mount phase. We will have a minimal shell on which we need to run the following commands:

mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
/mnt/vgrecover.sh

We are mounting /dev/sda1 (our /boot) on /mnt, which we have just created. Then we call the vgrecover.sh script we have created before. It will use LVM recovery commands to re-sign the PV on /dev/sda2, and then recover the VG meta-data using our modified meta-data file, describing a new relative positions of LVs.

When done, assuming no problems happened there, just umount /mnt and reboot. The system should boot up successfully, however, /boot will not have the designated size just yet.

Extending /boot :

The partition /dev/sda1 is of the updated size now, however, the filesystem is not. You can verify that using ‘fdisk -l /dev/sda’ of ‘parted -s /dev/sda unit s p’ or any other command. If this is not the case, then check your process.

Extending the filesystem depends on the type of filesystem. You can run ‘df -hPT /boot’ to identify the filesystem type. If it is XFS, use the command:

xfs_growfs /boot

If the filesystem is of type ext3 or ext4, use

resize2fs /dev/sda1

Other filesystems will require different tools, and since I cannot cover it all, I leave it to you. This is an online process, and as soon as it is over, the new size will show in the ‘df’ command.

Recovery:

If, for some reason, the disk partitioning or PV re-signing failed, and the system cannot boot, you can use the original-disk-layout.txt file in /boot to recover the original disk layout. Boot into GRUB rescue mode as shown above, and run:

mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sfdisk -f /dev/sda < /mnt/original-disk-layout.txt

If your /boot is inaccessible, and the file original-disk-layout.txt was kept on an external storage, you can use a live Ubuntu, or any other live system to run the ‘sfdisk’ command as shown above to recover /dev/sda original partitioning layout.

Bottom line:

This is a possible, although complex, task, and you should practice it on a VM, with disk snapshots before you attempt to kill production servers. Leave me a comment if it worked, or if there is anything I need to add or correct in this post. Thanks, and good luck!